


Return Zero

by eeyore1222



Category: Person of Interest (TV)
Genre: 'cause Root is alive, F/F, So is John, This is what happens after 5x13, as is everybody else
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-08
Updated: 2016-10-08
Packaged: 2018-08-20 05:12:26
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,680
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8237305
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eeyore1222/pseuds/eeyore1222
Summary: Episode 14, Season 5





	

**Author's Note:**

> This is an English translation of a story I wrote earlier in Chinese (in case anyone is interested, here is the link: http://one-dummy-ear.lofter.com/post/1d0e72a1_c3d4bed ).  
>    
> I took the idea, and a name, from Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient.

Return Zero  
   
Hana had the day off when Jane Doe Zero came to their hospice. She rode her bike to the neighboring town Maple to buy some apples, and on her way back it started to rain. It was very light, not even enough to damp her clothes, but it gave an impressionist stroke to the colorful trees on both sides of the road. Late autumn in upstate New York was beautiful. Hana pedaled fast, large, wet dots of red, yellow, and orange flying past her, jumbled together into some kind of watercolor painting. Cold wind greeted her heated cheeks with cool, gentle raindrops, bringing an indescribable delight.  
   
That was how, in Hana’s memory, the image of Zero became connected to the fresh smell of new apples with raindrops on them. It was a smell so different from the sick and decaying one pervasive in the hospice, that Hana had good reason to believe that Zero could make it.  
   
Jane Doe Zero was the 22nd patient that came under Hana’s care in the hospice.  
   
She was also the only one still alive.  
   
*  
   
The hospice was not large, in a building transformed from an old private residence. It was a branch of a neuroscience research institute affiliated with Carrow Ltd., New York. Hana had worked here for two years now. The 21 patients before Zero were all people with severe brain damage as results of car accidents, falling from high places, gunshot wounds, or incidents of heavy objects crashing their heads. Normal medical treatment could no longer help them, so these poor souls were sent here from all over the country by family members or friends still holding on to a shred of hope of them recovering whatever little part of their former selves.  
   
Jane Doe Zero, however, was a mystery. She had no name, no identity, no family or friend, no anyone. She came from nowhere and didn’t seem to have a place to go back to. She was already in the intense care ward when Hana got back. What was even more surprising than her mysterious appearance was that of Stewart, who had been transferred to an overseas post by the company a year ago. Stewart was no friend of Hana’s, but to her knowledge he was one of the best BCI technicians in their profession.  
   
She was checking all the tubes and monitoring devices Zero had on her body when she heard Stewart exchanging small talk with other nurses in the corridor. “Where have you been for the past year?” Someone asked.  
   
“At the other end of the world!” He responded with much amusement in his tone.  
   
Then he was in the room, standing by the bed as he supervised Hana putting EEG on Zero’s head. “I remember you. You’re Hana, right?” He grinned and winked at her. “Pretty girl. What would you say if I told you that I spent the last 12 months in a jail in Johannesburg?”  
   
That was it. That little detail in his eyes that had alienated Hana from the start.  
   
Stewart might not be evil. But he saw no difference between any patient and a lab rat.  
   
*  
   
Zero was not just any patient though.  
   
Her head had been shaved clean for the surgery and the EEG monitoring, and under a strip of bandage behind her right ear there was a long, deep, grotesque gash, as if she had had her skull cut open by some chain saw, the cruelness of which must be the reason she was sent here. But that was not her most severe injury.  
   
The fatal one was on her chest. Debris of a bullet hitting one of her left ribs had punctured several internal organs, causing massive hemorrhage. Surgery had already removed a lung lobe and her spleen before she became Hana’s patient, although her ribcage still needed reconstruction. Her heartbeat was so weak that for almost a week Hana was in constant fear that it would just stop. She remained unconscious, relying on a respirator to pump air in and out of her shattered chest.  
   
Hana asked around, but other than Stewart, no one knew anything about this patient. She just laid there, all alone, pale and thin like a piece of paper, only brain waves being recorded by the EEG an indicator that there was still a person somewhere in that body.  
   
Hana did not understand why they were monitoring her brain activity when the patient was in such a fragile condition. Judging from all the state-of-the-art apparatus Stewart had brought with him, they were definitely monitoring more than her brain waves.  
   
*  
   
Even Stewart shared her doubt.  
   
“She was in too bad a shape,” he informed an old man who came visiting a few days later. “Shall we wait till she got better?”  
   
The old man had with him a rather exaggerated retinue, and on his face even more exaggerated creases. Hana was told that he was some big shot from the parent firm. She captured the name “Decima” in the whispers around the house, although no one was able to explain the exact relationship between Decima and Carrow.  
   
The old man smiled in a gentle manner but it was not warm enough to balance the coldness in his words. “I highly doubt she would. Who knows how many days she has? Samaritan needs as much information as you can get from that brain of hers. We don’t have time.”  
   
“Shall we try the stuff we did in South Africa?” Stewart asked. “I’ve accumulated enough data to produce a virtual Sameen Shaw, exactly as the real one. That can be just the positive stimuli she needs.”  
   
The old man gloomily shook his head. “As it is, I don’t see how that is necessary. We already have the cochlea implant, and with it it’s just a matter of time to locate the machine. What Samaritan wants is knowledge of the machine’s interface, the only aspect in which Samaritan does not have an advantage. All you are told to do is to record and analyze her EEG data, and as for you,” he turned and pointed one finger at Hana standing in the corner, “you just keep her alive as long as possible.”  
   
Stewart seemed dispirited while Hana silently sighed in relief.  
   
*  
   
Stewart brought with him a number of computers, and he made sure that the screen of one of them was always kept out of Hana’s line of sight. He would sink deep in the sofa across from the bed, with the notebook on his lap and headphones over his ears, staring at the screen for hours. Hana was suspicious that he was watching porn, but the expression on his face was far from lewd. It was a little sad actually, if that adjective could be used on Stewart, whose smile was almost always inappropriate, to say the least.  
   
Hana was never the curious kind. Two years of working for Carrow further taught her to mind her own job, never asking others what was going on in theirs.  
   
The hospice had seen busier days. At the moment it housed less than ten patients besides Zero. Carrow had been gradually transferring people out in the past 6 months. Hana barely had any friends now.  
   
Stewart’s was a familiar face. They sat together in Zero’s quiet ward, in quiet company to the quiet patient in deep coma.  
   
“Do you have any idea of what you are doing?” Hana was on the verge of falling asleep resting her head by Zero’s hand when she heard Stewart asking from the other side of the room. It was a cloudy and languid long day that felt to have stretched on forever.  
   
“Wh …… What?”  
   
“Our job, you know,” Stewart was still wearing that grin of his, one that made it difficult to tell whether he was saying things with kindness or malevolence in heart. “Have you ever pondered the possibility that we are not helping anyone?”  
   
Still quite dizzy from drowsiness, Hana refused to ponder that possibility. Two years ago she would have answered: “of course we’re helping these people”, with a certainty that she didn’t have right now. So she just shook her head to clear that dense fog from her brain, and gave another inspection over all the devices connected to various parts of her patient.  
   
“I need to give her a body scrub. Please avert your eyes.”  
   
This time, the expression on Stewart’s face was definitely lewd. “Oh, Hana. Believe me. There is nothing I haven’t seen before.”  
   
*  
   
Stewart left for New York two weeks after that. On the same day they had a massive blackout and lost all internet access. All the phone lines went dead. No cell can pick up any signal all the way up to Maple. The town was also in blackout and chaos. People were saying that this is something bigger than upstate New York. It was the entire Northeastern region. Or even the whole country.  
   
But nothing was confirmed. No one knew for sure what had happened. No information could come in. No message could be sent out. The emergency generator did not have enough power to sustain the hospice. They lost three patients in the first night.  
   
Things were not getting any better when the new day begun. Another two passed away in the second.  
   
On day three, the other four survivors and their nurses were being transported out. Zero was left behind. Everyone thought, and Hana agreed, that merely moving her out of bed would kill her instantly.  
   
Somebody had to stay. She was under Hana’s care after all.  
   
“It would be over soon,” the head nurse tried to assure her. “Just wait for further notice from us.”  
   
*  
   
Further notice never came.  
   
On day six, after their diesel reserve ran out, Hana disconnected all the devices on Zero’s body and removed the respirator. She spent the night sitting at her bedside, the only sound in the whole world being random bird chirpings and the wind stirring the pine trees outside their window.  
   
She was amazed to find Zero still there with her when feeble rays of early morning came into the room.  
   
*  
   
Apparently, they were the only two people left on earth now.  
   
She touched Zero’s bare head with her fingers. Soft, brown hair was starting to grow anew. Even in her miserable condition, Hana could still see a beautiful woman, with exquisite facial features and elegant bone structure. She imagined Zero would have thick, wavy curls when her hair grew long enough.  
   
She remembered the faces of every patient she’d lost in this hospice. 21 of them. Stewart’s question had nothing to do with it. It was all about her professional pride, or what was left of it.  
   
She wanted Zero to live.  
   
*  
   
Stewart took disks and reports with him but the computers were left behind. Hana picked the secret notebook up, popped up the screen and was greeted by a video file played half way through the last time.  
   
It was not porn. Disordered and confusing images, dim and blurred around the edge, flooded in. Hana could not make sense of them, but she could see one of the fuzzy figures as her patient herself. The tall, thin woman had long, wavy brown hair, beautiful just as she had pictured in her mind.  
   
There was a dog, very smart and extremely cool. There were libraries and streets, parks and grass and trees. An old phone was always ringing somewhere. A subway station jumped out quite often, but it looked strange, with tables and computers and benches and beds scattered around the platform. An electronic synthesized voice was constantly talking in the background, spitting out words that Hana could discern disparately but put together made no sense at all. There was an old gentleman with glasses, some professor maybe, always smiling warmly at everyone. There was a tall, big guy with grey hair, and another short, fat one. These two also had smiles on their faces, one quite reserved, the other in unbridled cheerfulness. A young girl with dimples in her cheeks and books in her arms had similar dark brown curls as Zero, giggling sweetly as she swept past in a single flash. Hana could imagine her to be Zero when she was a teenager.  
   
This was Zero’s world in her own mind, one that Stewart had reconstructed from the EEG data he collected. In this world everyone seemed happy, except a short woman in black who was around the most often. She was serious and aloof the whole time, even when she moved in close to kiss Zero.  
   
She always stood nearby though, sometimes even grabbing Zero’s hand. She looked into Zero’s eyes and said over and over again: Find a place where you feel safe.  
   
“That’s right where I am,” a joyful voice responded, “here with you, Sweetie.”  
   
That must be how Zero sounded when she spoke: soft, warm, and full of delight.  
   
The battery went dead at that moment and their world returned to complete silence.  
   
*  
   
Power came back on the tenth day. Cellphone signals followed.  
   
Hana called the institute in New York but no one answered. The system informed her that the numbers were invalid the second time she tried.  
   
She rode to Maple on her bike. The town was still in a mess but she did manage to acquire apples and bread.  
   
*  
   
She was peeling an apple when Zero came to for the first time. Hana looked up, was shocked, dropped the apple, and got a knife cut on her hand in the process.  
   
“Can you hear me?” She asked.  
   
Beautiful brown eyes locked onto her face. Long soft lashes were lowered, and uplifted. Lowered again, and uplifted again.  
   
“Do you know who you are?”  
   
She closed her eyes for the third time and did not reopen. Zero was back in her coma.  
   
*  
   
After that Zero came around more often and stayed awake for longer moments. But she never spoke a word.  
   
“Do you have a name?” Hana fed her some apple juice and tried to pull some information out of the bundle of mystery that was Jane Doe Zero. “I cannot keep calling you ‘Zero’. ‘Zero’, ‘Zero’… that’s just bad manners. I’m Hana and it’s nice to meet you.”  
   
The woman’s face was ashes pale but there was life in her eyes. Her right hand managed some small movement that seemed like typing, so Hana took her phone out of her pocket.  
   
Zero’s wrist was just as skinny as the rest of her. But slender, weak fingers were able to type out a line on the screen as if they were guided by invisible strings. “Thank you Hanna.”  
   
“Oh, it’s Hana, H-A-N-A. You don’t need to say that. It is my job.”  
   
To be honest, she did not have much confidence in that job part. The internet was back on, but Hana had not been able to find any information on either Carrow or the neuroscience research institute. Her colleagues and the other four patients, as well as all the patients they had housed earlier, just disappeared without a trace. She begun to feel that her endeavors to help Zero did not have any institutional support. It was just herself, but she couldn’t even find digital traces of her own past. There is no proof of her own existence, just like the big, empty house that she and Zero were in. It was as if they had been wiped off the face of the earth. Only the frail but insistent life of Zero before her eyes was a reminder that she could not possibly be in a dream.  
   
Stewart’s words began to make sense. Maybe she’d been kept in the dark for two years. Maybe she’d been helping an illegal organization doing evil work. And maybe, hidden behind Zero’s fragile and endearing smile was a dangerous criminal. She couldn’t find outside help for Zero if she desired the woman to live.  
   
She had some cash to buy necessities for herself from Maple. She would be fine for a little while longer. But she couldn’t get the medical supplies Zero needed. Very. Urgently.  
   
Zero’s eyes were getting more and more animated as the days went by, but her physical conditions were not showing any sign of improvement. Actually, Hana could tell that her body was deteriorating even further.  
   
“You have to tell me how to contact your family and friends for help, Zee,” she pleaded. “There is only so much that I can do.”  
   
Slim fingers performed a feeble but skillful dance over the screen of her cellphone. “She will find me.”  
   
“That friend of yours? The one that never smiles?” Hana asked but was not answered. The dance drained Zero’s daily’s share of energy and she was back to her slumber.  
   
Hana finished what was left of the apples and prayed to an oblivious God that Zero would wake up again.  
   
*  
   
When that expressionless woman finally turned up, it was deep in the night. A dog barking startled Hana from her sleep in Zero’s ward, and she was there, with the dog, standing by Zero’s bed in darkness. The woman had passed through several locked doors without making any sound.  
   
Hana had been stranded in the room with her patient for nearly a month now, on the verge of panic so desperate that the scene before her eyes at that moment was more comfort than surprise.  
   
The silence went on for some more time before she ventured a hello. “I’m Hana,” she said tentatively, not sure what response she would get.  
   
The dog had fallen asleep by Zero’s feet. The woman in black finally turned her eyes from the figure of her unconscious friend to Hana on the sofa. The deep voice that Hana had heard many times in the video telling Zero to “find a place where you feel safe” was saying something new.  
   
“How old are you?”  
   
Hana was taken aback by the strange question. “25.”  
   
The woman did not have facial paralysis after all. Her lips cocked ever so slightly in what could pass for a smile. “She would appreciate that coincidence very much.”  
   
*  
   
The next morning Hana made another trip to Maple. She used all the cash left in her purse to buy a box of donuts and a small bag of apples. The shopkeeper gave her a cup of hot chocolate as a gift, which she took outside, sat down on a bench, and took her time to drink up in cold wind. She found herself crying a little and couldn’t explain it. Then she put all her purchase in the front basket of her bike, and slowly pedaled back to the hospice.  
   
There was one more visitor in Zero’s ward when she got there. It was the fat man from that video, sans his unbridled cheerfulness. He spent long hours whispering into his phone, rubbing the corner of his red eyes from time to time as he spoke.  
   
That night, an ambulance showed up at the gate of the hospice with the other two friends of Zero’s, the gentleman with glasses and the tall man with grey hair, much paler though than the video version of himself. He was in a wheelchair and remained motionless like a sculpture at the foot of the steps, one hand hidden in his overcoat the entire time, scanning the road with alert eyes. Hana watched on as the other three moved Zero out of her ward. Her patient was awake for a very brief moment, and she spent all of it staring at the short woman’s face. A grin spread from the corners of her dry lips to the back of her ears, making Hana worried that she might tear her wound in the process.  
   
“Is she ok?” Well, Zero could speak. Indeed.  
   
“As good as you are doing right now.” The woman in black lowered her head near Zero’s left ear and answered in the same passionless voice. Her fingers were a different story though, gentle as they were brushing against Zero’s bony cheek. The movement revealed a tattoo, in the shape of a simple, black arrow, on her left wrist on the inside. Zero caught it too, seemed stunned, and all of a sudden there were tears dropping onto the pillow.  
   
“I see that my message was delivered.”  
   
“Next time you got something to say, I’d prefer that you say it yourself.”  
   
*  
   
The man with glasses came up to Hana in a stiff limp, although the constant gentleman manner never wavered. “Thank you, Hana, for helping our friend.”  
   
“I’m sorry I couldn’t do more. Her prognosis is not good. She still needs …”  
   
“She will get the best treatment there is.”  
   
Hana nodded. A question had been bothering her for some time now.  
   
“What happened to Stewart?”  
   
The man was no longer smiling. “He is dead, as are almost all your co-workers. I’m sorry.”  
   
She was shocked speechless, standing on the steps in a hazy numbness as the man took an envelope from the inside pocket of his coat. He handed it over. “Perhaps you’ve figured it out already, Hana, that the institution you work for no longer exists. Here are all the things you need to begin a new life, and please heed my words. Forget everything that has happened here and just leave. As soon as possible. Start anew, for the sake of your own safety.”  
   
She took the envelope and stuffed it inside her coat, watching silently as they moved first Zero’s stretcher, and then the grey-haired man’s wheelchair into the vehicle. The fat man climbed into the driver’s seat as the man with glasses got into the passenger’s with some difficulty. The woman jumped out from the back door of the ambulance just as she thought they were moving away, and walked up to Hana in a few strong strides.  
   
“Words cannot express how grateful I am, Hana. She’s too important to me.”  
   
“Can I know her name?” Hana finally asked.  
   
She could see sparkles of the warmest kind in those cold, dark eyes. “Samantha. She’s Samantha.”

**Author's Note:**

> 1.       I’ve been obsessed with Stewart’s end ever since 6,741. I can bear a grudge, I know.  
> 2.       Hanna Frey died 25 years ago, in 1991.  
> 3.       I happen to be one of the very few who can accept that Root is referred to as “Samantha Groves” in certain circumstances. In this particular story though, Shaw used that name for Hana’s own protection. I can also see it as an unusual term of endearment.


End file.
